All articles with 'Microsoft Excel Formulas' Tag

This is first part of 2 part series on conditionally formatting dates in excel.

Conditional formatting is a very useful feature in Excel. You can use Conditional formatting to tell excel how to format cells that meet certain conditions. For eg. You can use conditional formatting to show all negative values in a range in red color. Today we will learn how to use conditional formatting to format dates.

Sales reports and dashboards are very common in any company. There are several ways in which you can visualize sales data to understand the trends and sales performance. So in November, I have asked you to visualize sales data using sample data. The visualization challenge #2, sponsored by Zoho Reports generated a huge buzz around the community and fetched 32 incredible entries. The response was so overwhelming that it took me almost 24 hours to write this post. Thanks everyone for participating and making this a huge learning experience for everyone. Personally I have learned several useful dashboard and charting tricks. I will be sharing some of these lessons with all of you in the coming weeks.

Lets celebrate these holidays in PHD Style. By learning few excel formulas that you can use to find out dates for some of the popular public holidays like – labor day, memorial day etc. When is Labor Day (US) in 2010? Labor day (the US variant) is celebrated on first Monday of every September. It […]

Here is a 2010 new year gift to all our readers – a free 2010 calendar excel file (a little secret: just change the year in “outline” sheet from 2010 to 2011, to get the next years calendar. It works all the way up to year 9999). You can even get a Printable PDF Calendar. There are 14 different sheets in the calendar file. First one is an outline calendar for the entire year. The next 12 are monthly calendars. And the last sheet shows a mini-calendar for the year 2010.

Read the rest of this post to know more and download the calendar.

Often when you need to generate a sample from large data set, you may want to pick data from a random date. In such cases, you can use excel’s RAND() and RANDBETWEEN() formulas to pick a random date. Here I have included few examples,

Steven, one of our readers from England sent me a Christmas gift tracker worksheet. I found it pretty cool, so made some minor changes to it and sharing it with you all so that you can have great time shopping for the holidays.

The workbook is full of lessons on conditional formatting, cell formatting, using formulas. Go ahead and download it today.

Every year, on 4th Thursday of November, folks in US celebrate Thanksgiving day. A similar holiday exists in Canada too, they celebrate it on Second Monday of Every October.We will celebrate thanksgiving in PHD style, by sharing a wacky formula tip.

Today, we are going to learn how to use excel formulas to find out thanksgiving day’s date for any year.

Here is a simple yet novel use of formulas. Let us say you have a list of values in range A1:A5 and you want to reverse the list. In an empty cell write =INDEX($A$1:$A$5,6-ROWS($A$1:A1)) and copy down. Boom, you get the reversed list. Here is how the formula works: In the reversed list, first item […]

Two charting principles we hear all the time are,

• Sort your data in a meaningful order before plotting it.
• Show only relevant information, not everything – because un-necessary information clutters the chart.

Today we will learn a dynamic charting technique that will mix these two ideas in a useful way. I call this a Top X chart.

Today we will learn a new and exciting excel formula – the all powerful SUMPRODUCT.

At the outset SUMPRODUCT formula may not seem like all that useful. But once you understand how excel works with lists (or arrays) of data, the SUMPRODUCT’s relevance becomes crystal clear.

Anyone working on the data using excel will know the importance of lookup formulas. They are vital for making almost any spreadsheet or dashboard. That is why when my friend John Franco, who maintains Excel-Spreadsheet-Authors.com, wrote to me about his new book Excel lookup toolbox I was truly excited. In this post I am going to share my review of this product.

We all know that data validation is a very useful feature in Excel. You can use data validation to create a drop-down list in a cell and limit the values user can enter. But, do you know that you can use data validation in a multitude of ways to prevent users from entering wrong data?

Here is a practical application: Prevent users from entering duplicate values in a range of cells.

For eg. you are making an invoice. Wouldn’t it be cool if Excel prompted you when you enter a duplicate line item so that increase the item quantity instead of repeating it.

We all know that to make a chart we must specify a range of values as input.

But what if our range is dynamic and keeps on growing or shrinking. You cant edit the chart input data ranges every time you add a row. Wouldn’t it be cool if the ranges were dynamic and charts get updated automatically when you add (or remove) rows?

Well, you can do it very easily using excel formulas and named ranges. It costs just $1 per each change. 😉

Ofcourse not, there are 2 ways to do this. One is to use Excel Tables and another is to use OFFSET formula.

While feeding the babies last night, I had this idea. Why not make an excel sheet where you can keep track of the baby’s feeding and sleeping activities on day to day basis. It would probably help you understand your baby’s needs better and may be give you some insights.

We all know that bar charts can be used to display values spread across various categories or times and pie charts / donut charts can be used to display percentage breakup of various quantities in a sum total. How about mashing up both to create a Donut Bar chart?

In this tutorial, you can learn how to make a donut bar chart and linking it to a form control to display Product-wise sales breakups spread across several years.